It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing her
fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea before.
It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp
crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for miles and miles
on either side of the island. It was very small; shaped something like a
leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat, she thought, beginning to tell
herself a story of adventure about escaping from a sinking ship. But with
the sea streaming through her fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind
them, she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the
sense of adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as
the boat sailed on, how her father's anger about the points of the compass,
James's obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had
slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next?
Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea,
there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure
(that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the
drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here
and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a
world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there,
a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, and
shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold- sprinkled
waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—
even that little island? The old gentlemen in the study she
thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from the garden
purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be Mr Carmichael
or Mr Bankes who was sitting with her father) sitting opposite each
other in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in front of them the
pages of THE TIMES, when she came in from the garden, all in a
muddle, about something some one had said about Christ, or hearing
that a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or wondering
what Napoleon was like. Then they took all this with their clean hands
(they wore grey-coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and they
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brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees, and
said something now and then very brief. Just to please herself she would
take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, so
equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with a little
cough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old gentleman
opposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open, one
could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water; and if it
did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and THE TIMES crackling
then it was right. And watching her father as he wrote in his study,
she thought (now sitting in the boat) he was not vain, nor a tyrant and
did not wish to make you pity him. Indeed, if he saw she was there,
reading a book, he would ask her, as gently as any one could, Was there
nothing he could give her?
Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book
with the shiny cover mottled like a plover's egg. No; it was right. Look at
him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James had his eye on
the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings the talk
round to himself and his books, James would say. He is intolerably egotistical.
Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she said, looking at him.
Look at him now. She looked at him reading the little book with his legs
curled; the little book whose yellowish pages she knew, without knowing
what was written on them. It was small; it was closely printed; on the
fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he had spent fifteen francs on dinner;
the wine had been so much; he had given so much to the waiter; all
was added up neatly at the bottom of the page. But what might be written
in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, she did
not know. What he thought they none of them knew. But he was absorbed
in it, so that when he looked up, as he did now for an instant, it
was not to see anything; it was to pin down some thought more exactly.
That done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into his reading. He
read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large
flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and
sometimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the
bramble, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble
blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he
went, tossing over page after page. And she went on telling herself a
story about escaping from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat
there; safe, as she felt herself when she crept in from the garden, and
took a book down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper suddenly,
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said something very brief over the top of it about the character of
Napoleon.
She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its
sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important
now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and
sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had
sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each
alone.
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